We often cite the photo book’s longevity and accessibility by way of comparing the relative merits of publications versus exhibitions. Among several presenters during this symposium the issue of access was raised, and we were reminded of how tenuous that access can be. Mike Mandel and Chantal Zakari’s The State of Ata is experiencing censorship in Turkey, not from the conservative government but from publishers Thames and Hudson who have chosen not to distribute their title for fear of controversy. Jeffrey Ladd founded Errata Editions to re-present classic and obscure photography publications in part to make those books accessible to interested readers located outside of cultural capitals like New York City or Paris—yet books are supposed to be the modes of presentation that aren’t dependent on location. Dutch photographers Theo Baart and Cary Markerink reminded us of the obvious—though books of photography are about images, without translated text distribution can be minimal. Do photographic artists need text at all accompanying their photographs, a question with which Danielle Mericle grappled in her book Seneca Ghosts? Her co-publisher, Ron Jude, indicated that there is no explanatory text in A-Jump’s books because they are about the experience of looking at photographs.

There’s a shop I like to visit in Pasadena, California, which sells everything from jewelry to decoupage trays to taxidermy; they also sell photography books, so I usually chat with the owner about how they’re selling. I’m especially interested in finding photography books for sale by unlikely retailers; as I briefly mentioned in the discussion following Jason Fulford’s presentation, I first discovered his J & L Books in a travel bookstore. This shop’s owner told me about a book of photographs with a short essay published in 2000 by a pair of photographers which, now in its 7th edition, still sells well in his shop. However, the photographers’ highly anticipated follow up book from 2008, which contains no text, does not sell at all because, customers tell him, it lacks text; that audience, which is not necessarily a photo audience, relies upon some contextualization of the images in order to invest in the book.

Now, photography books are the only fine art medium that anyone will buy—lay audiences don’t ordinarily purchase a book of paintings or sculpture, for example, without being interested in the particular artist, but they will purchase a book of photographs by someone they’ve never heard of. And you can’t always or only count on the photo book crowd to buy your photo book. As Ron Jude, co-founder of A-Jump Books pointed out, their bestselling title—to date, more than all of their other titles combined—isn’t a book of photographs at all but rather a book of drawings made as study aids by student Charles Woodard of iconic photographs when his printer failed mid-semester. I bought 3 myself. It’s food for thought because, of course, distribution is one of the basic considerations for any book, whether it is an edition of 10 or 10000. Where and how do artists circulate them? In whose hands do they want to place them? Susan kae Grant tries to place her meticulously hand-crafted artist’s books in public collections rather than private ones; the ability for viewers to visit the work and hold it, read it, smell the materials of which its made, and listen closely as pages separate and turn or covers snap shut is essential to the books’ existence, its meaning. Similarly, Greg Halpern gave away some of the 35 copies of his Omaha Sketchbook to those he hoped would be “kindred spirits.” Once artists have placed their books into eager hands, how do these objects function to be read? The scale of the primary book in Cary Markerink’s Memory Traces was dictated by the images themselves, which unfold and expand or contract between other pages as necessary; the smaller books can be held in one hand, intimately. This is a book that both commands space and requires close attention.

As labor intensive as the fabrication of the artist’s book can be, as demonstrated by François Deschamp’s child-labor assembly line for Drone/ 1 2 3 or Susan kae Grant’s Polaroid transfers on lead for Radio Active Substances, it’s nothing compared to how long it can take to conceptualize and realize one’s book—for Mandel and Zakari, what they imagined might become a book after a few months of shooting ultimately took 12 years to realize; the spark of an idea in 2000 launched Stephen Marc on a nearly 10-year journey to print. Susan kae Grant began Night Journey in 1993, set it aside until 2000, and continues to work on it today.

There is surely a magic in the photography book that takes hold of the artist and doesn’t let go. As Danielle Mericle succinctly put it, “books are just fun.” How else to explain Greg Halpern thinking his first book, Harvard Works Because We Do, didn’t at all represent his vision of the project, and yet he continues to collaborate with publishers to make books? Why has Theo Baart continued to make books, despite the fact that he described his first publication as an awful, albeit bestselling, experience? Or Cary Markerink hating his first effort so much even he didn’t keep a copy? One way to avoid the bitter disappointment of watching your personal vision succumb to someone else’s edits is to cut out the middle man. Baart and Markerink’s Ideas on Paper, Ron Jude and Danielle Mericle’s A-Jump Books, Alec Soth’s Little Brown Mushroom, and Susan kae Grant’s Black Rose Books are all presses founded to publish the photographers’ own work, and of course there’s a fine tradition of that dating back to 1844 when William Henry Fox Talbot opened his Reading establishment to produce the tipped-in salt prints for editions of The Pencil of Nature—since photography’s inception photographers have understood that if you want to see your images circulate in books, it helps to also become a publisher. Of course, Talbot’s Reading Establishment was ultimately a financial failure, so it was appreciated that Jeffrey Ladd, Theo Baart and Cary Markerink didn’t shy away from addressing what is often the giant elephant in the room when talking about art—what exactly does making that thing cost, and how did you pay for it? Keeping the enterprise afloat can be harder than finding the inspiration to make a book at all. Errata Books tips in a print on special editions of its self-funding series.

In his introductory remarks on Thursday morning, Tate Shaw cited Alex Sweetman’s 1984 essay on what a photobook is as part of the inspiration behind this symposium. Sweetman wrote:

Photobookworks are a function of the inter-relation between two factors: the power of the single photograph and the effect of serial arrangements in book form. Such arrangements may be viewed as worlds which the individual photographs inhabit and, therefore, as their context. Individual pictures may act as expressive images and/or as information; combinations of these can produce series, sequences, juxtapositions, rhythms, and recurring themes.

The photobookwork, then, is a series of images–that is, a tightly knit, well-edited, organized group or set of images in a linear sequence presented in book form. Linearity is important because it gives the imagery its temporal quality. Events occur, stories unfold, things are shown and said; through the progression of the construct, we view the conditions of being in the world, the flow of time and experience.

Many of the photographers during the symposium spoke about how they conceive of their images in book form, discussing the importance of sequencing and design as integral to their methodologies. Danielle Mericle, Greg Halpern and Jason Fulford each spoke of their books challenging our assumptions of what a photograph can do, of making books of photographs that question the experience of engaging with a photograph. A “hovering quality” is how Jason Fulford describes the sequencing and juxtaposition of his images, that space between images that Halpern acknowledges needs a better term than “juxtaposition.” As demonstrated by Sweetman’s quote, the primacy of image sequencing is certainly nothing new; at least fifty years ago artists like Minor White and later Nathan Lyons elevated the sequence beyond a simple negotation of how to put images together to its own art form, so it is perhaps instructive in this moment to harken back to their writings and philosophies on the subject in establishing a contemporary terminology for the photo book work.

The 17 presenters and two curators whose works and ideas have been presented throughout and accompanying this symposium, demonstrate a dazzling array of photo book practices, aesthetics, intentions, and approaches, from one-of-a-kind handmade with original photographic prints, to print-on-demand digitally printed and commercially bound books deconstructed to create a new form of one-of-a-kind artists books to traditional 1,000-run offset books to a sold-out 10,000-run edition on newsprint to a dressmaker’s dummy festooned with paper price tags. The possibilities are now and indeed have always been endless; in this moment in which traditional publishing is dying while photo books are flourishing, it is our mission as artists and audience to define what the next decades of this discipline will mean for everyone who has ever contemplated any book.

Passage on the Underground Railroad: Photographs by Stephen Marc, Stephen Marc in conjunction with University Press of Mississippi, 176 pages, 11 x 17 inches, 87 color illustrations, bibliography, map, ISBN 978-1-60473-129-3 Cloth $52.50 (website price).

Full disclosure—I’m a contributor to this title.

Congrats, Stephen— I received my copies today and the book looks gorgeous. It was a long time in the making but well worth the effort. I can’t wait to share my copies.